People don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't. What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. But you can cut other taxes in response.

The push is the R&D, the pull is the carbon tax. Yes, the government will be somewhat inept, but the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.

You then offset that [carbon tax] with a reduction in payroll taxes, dollar for dollar. And that's why I was so flexible. It's a tax swap, that's what I was talking about. It wouldn't grow the government, and it would approximate the attachment of these negative externalities to combustion fossil fuels.

If we're willing to send half a million fellow citizens into battle, to protect oil supplies and our economic way of life, we should be no less willing to make the small sacrifice of paying more for gasoline. A revenue-neutral plan that reduced Social Security taxes by $1 billion for every penny a gallon of gas tax would leave the working poor and middle class better off than before. In the long t...See More

The profit of destroying nature or polluting the planet is nearly always privatized, while the costs of polluting the planet or the cost of destroying ecosystems is nearly always socialized. That cannot continue.

Ted Gayer
Vice President and Director of the Economic Studies program and Joseph A. Pechman Senior Fello

A carbon tax, in which the revenues are used to off set economically harmful taxes or to pay down our deficit, would substantially low er the cost of climate policy compared to a cap-and-trade program that gives away allowances for free.

We should seek out the many forms of subsidy that run through the entire energy enterprise and eliminate them. In their place we propose a measure that could go a long way toward leveling the playing field: a revenue-neutral tax on carbon, a major pollutant.

a stiff severance tax on carbon, levied at the well head, mine mouth, or port of entry, would go a long way by both reducing carbon use and giving an incentive for developing alternative carbon-free technologies.

Robert H. Frank
University of California, Berkeley, Georgia Institute of Technology

Reducing CO2 emissions would actually be surprisingly easy. The most effective remedy would be a carbon tax, which would raise the after-tax price of goods in rough proportion to the size of their carbon footprint.

Charles Wheelan
I teach public policy at Dartmouth. I am the author of Naked Money, Naked Statistics, and othe

Even in the face of uncertainty over the effects of global warming – including whether it is happening at all – the policy we ought to pursue is a no-brainer. We ought to protect ourselves from a potentially catastrophic outcome by curtailing carbon emissions now.

By taxing carbon dioxide (the harmless trace gas which makes the planet greener), the US government would be signalling to the world that it still believes in the man-made global warming narrative. This, in turn, would keep alive the crony-capitalist “renewables” industry in which Paulson, Steyer, Bloomberg and their friends are so heavily invested.